Rick Baudé Wrote:
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> well we're just at the beginning of the upward
> curve of AI. I remember once somebody said that
> AI would never be able to beat a human at Chess,
> now their beating humans at go.

Just like BG once said -- 128KB would more than enough memory in a computer for anyone


Clearly that ship
> has sailed. Rules are rules. Whether it's chess or
> facial recognition, you write a program for it and
> before long a computer will beat us at it.

Yes... any set of rules equating to program of algorithm is something a computer can be more efficient at.
But ask any shrink... intelligence doesn't really follow hard rules, just sorta guidelines and that not very well.

Well
> they become 'conscious' sure why not? There are no
> physical laws that forbid it. What's so special
> about carbon vs. silicon? Nothing. We're still not
> GLS (just a reminder, God's Little Snowflake).

"Sure, why not?" -- therein lies the crux IMO. The converse being, Sure, Why?
I freely admit as above that given hard rules with a mathematical equation, computers are more efficient (some would say smarter like beating us at chess, but no - as a software engineer of sorts, I know they are not smarter just more efficient and faster)
A modern day computer can only think in terms of binary - on or off. It can calculate etc.
No amount of programming can change that, and since intelligence, self awareness etc are based on grey zones of neither black nor white... modern computers can't become intelligent as per true A.I.

Now, in the future, I think you'd agree - trinary systems or fuzzy logic systems may lead to some kind of AI that isn't easily distinguishable from an organic intelligence. The only distinguishable factor I can imagine is our base biochemistries that provide us with our drive, our ambitions, our desires, etc. No purely mechanical/electronic AI will ever have that driving foundation and I cannot imagine any substitute for it -- perhaps my imagination is limited and something can be derived, but that's not in the near future.

Now... once you start hooking a computer up to a biological interface etc... that's a horse of a different color and I'd argue 1) that's not a computer, or at least not just a computer... and 2) That's not an artificial intelligence anymore, it's a real intelligence indistinguishable from ours, and extremely scary as it would be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than us.